DAILY DEVOTIONAL – April 27, 2020
“One the Wiser“
Prayer: Almighty God, You are the Omniscient One. You know all things because You created all things. There is none before You and none after You. You are the beginning and the end. Lord, we want to know You and the power of Your resurrection. In Your mercy, Lord, make us wise unto salvation for the glory of Your Holy name. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Scripture: Proverbs 3:13-18
Blessed is the one who finds wisdom,
and the one who gets understanding,
14 for the gain from her is better than gain from silver
and her profit better than gold.
15 She is more precious than jewels,
and nothing you desire can compare with her.
16 Long life is in her right hand;
in her left hand are riches and honor.
17 Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
and all her paths are peace.
18 She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;
those who hold her fast are called blessed.
Devotional – “One the Wiser”
In a speech delivered in 2005 to Miss Hall’s all-girl prep school in Massachusetts, speechwriter, consultant and philosophy professor Robert Steck said the following:
“Researchers have figured out that a single issue of the New York Times contains about twice as much information as the average citizen of Shakespeare’s London would have come across in an entire lifetime. And that’s just one issue of one newspaper from one American city. If you go on-line, of course, you can read newspapers from cities and regions all over the globe – and that’s just the newspaper websites, an extremely tiny percentage of the total.
The point is that any one of us has more instantaneous access to more information than Shakespeare could have expected to see in several lifetimes. But it is certainly not obvious that we have more wisdom.
There’s a clear difference between access to information and acquisition of wisdom. Having floods of information and too few tools to extract understanding or wisdom is like standing thirsty in front of Niagara Falls equipped only with a thimble. Make it an overriding mission to equip yourselves with better devices than just thimbles to sort through huge quantities of information.”
At the time of Professor Steck’s speech in 2005, there were over 600 million websites live on the internet. To put that into perspective. As of 2018, there were about 372 million people living in the United States. Today, 14 years after Professor Steck gave his speech, in 2019, there are over 1.5 billion websites live on the internet. That’s over twice as many websites, not to mention the additional books, magazines, journals, newspapers and all other sources of information. With at least twice as much available information than we had 14 years ago, do you think we have become twice as wise?
What is wisdom? What does it mean to be wise? Is wisdom what you know intellectually, or is it knowing what you don’t know? Is wisdom gained from the amount of experience you have or the experiences you have chosen not to have? Is wisdom found in good judgement or in knowing who or what determines what is good or bad? Who determines what is wise in the first place?
While the world can only define wisdom subjectively and by measuring only the effects of what it believes wisdom to be, the Bible defines wisdom in a radically different way. The Bible defines wisdom as a being, as a person and as an entity we can know. As it says in our text from Proverbs 3, “Blessed is the one who finds wisdom…she is more precious than jewels…long life is in her right hand.” The Bible reveals that wisdom is not any amount of facts or knowledge that we can attain, and neither does the Bible teach wisdom to be the manner in which we utilize information or intelligence. The Bible reveals that True Wisdom is a person. Who is that person? It is God alone.
Now, we don’t have the time within this devotional to address this topic in entirety, but when the Bible calls wisdom a “she”, it is not what our English speaking minds think of. The Bible is not defining the gender of wisdom here even in the slightest. The point Scripture is making here is that wisdom is not something to be gained through a text book or experience, but wisdom is to be “found” and it is to be “known”, and can be known because wisdom is a person.
There are plenty of people that know many things about me, and plenty of things about my wife. But, no matter how much anyone may think they know about my wife or I…nobody knows of her like I do. My wife knows me and I know my wife with a knowing that transcends facts and information. It even transcends our knowledge of each other from our experience together. In a similar manner this is what it means to know wisdom and to be wise.
God is wisdom. He is the source of all things visible and invisible. He is the source of all goodness and righteousness. He is the source of all things and all life. God is wisdom. If we seek to be truly wise, then we must seek to know God; not just to know about God, but to know of God, and to know of God first and only because God knows us and has called us to be His own.
Jesus said in John 10:27, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” To be truly wise is to know from whom true wisdom comes. To gain knowledge and wisdom is to know God and have a living relationship with Him through the love He has given us in Christ. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 8:2-3, “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. 3 But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.”
I very much like how J.J. Packer talks about this in his book Knowing God:
“What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him because He first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.”
Over 15 times in the book of Proverbs alone, Scripture tells us that God is the source of all wisdom and knowledge. A few of those passages stand out in particular, at least to me.
Proverbs 2:6, “For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.”
Proverbs 1:7, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
Proverbs 111:10, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding.”
Proverbs 9:10, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.”
God gave His own Son Jesus to die for our sins, to take the wrath of God against our wickedness so that God could once again draw near to us so that we might know Him and live forever in the knowledge of His grace and forgiveness. As 1 Timothy 2:4-6 says, God, “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all.”
Live wisely my friends, and live in the knowledge of God’s Word and in His love for You in Jesus.
Thanks for spending another time with me in devotion, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
